The first video game to depict Germany’s 1933-45 Nazi era uncensored, showing the swastika and image of Adolf Hitler, was revealed at a tradeshow this week.
‘Through the Darkest of Times’ was presented this week at Gamescom, Europe’s biggest trade fair for interactive games and entertainment.
The new title will allow players to enrol as members of the ‘Red Orchestra’, a network of groups who fought the Nazis before and during World War II.
The video game’s use of the Swastika has sparked debate over whether it is an advance for artistic freedom or whether it poses a danger of radicalisation.
A 1998 court ruling blocked video games from using Nazi symbols, with judges fearing at the time that children ‘will grow up with these symbols and insignia and grow accustomed to them’.
‘Through the Darkest of Times’ (pictured) was presented this week at Gamescom, Europe’s biggest trade fair for interactive games and entertainment. Players slip into the boots of members of the ‘Red Orchestra’, a network of groups who resisted the Nazis
In previous games, the black swastika on a white-and-red background was replaced with other symbols, including triangles, in order to comply with German law.
For example, the German edition of last year’s alternative-history blockbuster ‘Wolfenstein 2’, renamed Hitler and shaved his signature moustache.
Swastikas in the Wolfenstein universe were also replaced with other symbols.
But now regulations have eased and virtual Nazis are now allowed to be depicted wearing authentic symbols on their armbands.
The Führer’s facial hair and name can also be reinstated in the virtual world.
‘Developers used to be afraid to say what they were talking about, they just made up fantasies,’ said Joerg Friedrich, one of the developers of the new game.
‘Hitler wasn’t named Hitler but Heiler and had no moustache, there were no more Jews…. That’s problematic, because an entire facet of history has simply been hushed up.’
Since early August, the law has been changed in Germany.
Pressure from publishers and video game players finally convinced Germany’s entertainment software self-regulation body USK to grant the art form the same freedoms afforded to cinema and theatre.
‘For the first time, games that take a critical look at the events of the past can be granted approval in the name of “artistic freedom”,’ said USK director Elisabeth Secker.
Founder and game designer at Paint Bucket Games Joerg Friedrich developed the historical resistance strategy game ‘Through the Darkest of Times’
A screenshot from the historical resistance strategy game. It shows a book burning scene with a student making a “Hitler salute”. Computer and video games featuring Nazi symbols such as the swastika can now be sold in Germany uncensored after a regulatory body lifted the longstanding ban
A 1998 court ruling had blocked video games from using Nazi symbols, with judges fearing at the time that children ‘will grow up with these symbols and insignia and grow accustomed to them’.
Joerg Friedrich, one of the developers of the new video game, says previous restrictions on Nazi symbols had ‘simply hushed up’ a period of history.
Gamers have long chafed at the restrictions, which have often meant a different experience for German players than for those abroad.
‘It’s a past that we don’t necessarily have to hide, it can also be a warning,’ said Gamescom visitor Michael Schiessl.
Others argue that the swastika should remain taboo, fearing real-world consequences.
‘We shouldn’t play with swastikas,’ Family Affairs Minister Franziska Giffey told the Funke newspaper group on Thursday.
Germans above all must ‘always be conscious of their particular historical responsibility, even today’, she added.
Stefan Mannes, who runs an online information portal on the Third Reich named ‘The Future Needs Remembrance’, was blunter.
It comes after the controversy in Germany over the censorship of the shooter game ‘Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus’, which is set in a fictional 1961 where the Nazis won World War Two
In Germany, the swastikas were replaced with triangle symbols and Hitler’s moustache was removed
He asked how one could explain to youths who are exposed to swastikas in video games ‘that they’ll be prosecuted if they spray one on a wall?’
‘One doesn’t become a Nazi just by seeing a swastika,’ countered Klaus-Peter Sick, a historian at Berlin’s Marc Bloch Centre, a Franco-German social sciences research centre.
‘Players are intelligent and know how to tell the difference’ between fiction and reality, he added.
Self-regulation organisation USK has only slightly loosened its rules.
There will be no general permission for Nazi signs, but case-by-case decisions on whether their use is ‘socially appropriate’.
Other art forms have already blazed a trail in recent years, with many movies for the first time daring to satirise the dictator.
Films like ‘My Fuehrer: The Really Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler’ (2007), ‘Heil: A Neo-Nazi farce’ (2015) and ‘Look Who’s Back’ (2015), based on the best-selling novel of the same name, have packed cinemas.
And a new edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ – accompanied with reams of historical annotations – was published in 2016.
On the other hand, concern is growing over a resurgent and newly emboldened right-wing extremist and anti-immigration movement.
Leading figures of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have attacked Germany’s culture of remembrance of Nazi crimes and even sought to rehabilitate its soldiers of the two world wars.
Historian Klaus-Peter Sick nonetheless sees the video gaming move as another sign of ‘normalisation’ in Germany’s relationship with its dark past.
‘This society is able to read ‘Mein Kampf’ without becoming nostalgic. The dedicated Nazis are dead,’ he argued.
‘It’s a generational question: society has transformed itself and is now far from this period to which it no longer wants to return.’